#SteelerNation turns Tweets into a Terrible Towel Turning movement

I’m not one to write about the Steelers (so vote me out of Pittsburgh) but I just had to write about this one and today is as good a day as any to write this post.

Some clever, clever people in Pittsburgh put together a mechanism (all far too complicated for me) that uses the Twitter API and what can only be described as magic to hashtagged tweets into a physical movement.

A hashtag on twitter is a word or phrase used on twitter to group together tweets – it’s called a hashtag because it is preceded by a # (hash) and tags tweets.

A terrible towel is a yellow towel that just about everyone is Pittsburgh owns (or should own). There’s a history behind it but we’ll not go into it here (see the link below) – it’s a show of support for the Pittsburgh Steelers essentially.

The TwerribleTowel site shows a live video stream of a Terrible Towel Twirling. Big deal, right? The clever thing here is that every time someone on Twitter uses the hashtag #SteelersNation or #SteelerNation the towel twirls one complete rotation.

Here’s how……

I hope that other people pick up on this application though… maybe use hashtags to light a bulb or shock a coworker or… anything. It’s just really cool to essentially send a command, or have a group of people send a command to a device and make it do something.

Hopefully there’s an application out there that could make something do something productive like pump water in a third world country?